I bet this guy on the bar train one time, and I had my bass with me, and he goes, man,

what do you want to do? What's your dream? I'm Jesse Thorn on Bullseye Raphael Sidique. He's nominated for an Oscar. He played bass for Prince. And of course, he co-founded Tony, Tony, Tony. Uncle, I want to be in a band with my brother. That's on the next bullseye.

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When I was a teenager in the late 90s, I downloaded a special screensaver. It had lots of

pretty colors and graphs, but that's not why I wanted it.

My goal was to humbly contribute to humankind's search for intelligent life in the universe,

aka aliens. This effort is officially called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI.

The screensaver I downloaded, called SETI at Home, was part of a

large-scale community project to use people's everyday PCs to comb through radio signals that

hit Earth from space, mostly from stars. These signals have particular patterns. So if astronomers

find a signal that doesn't quite fit those patterns, it could mean some

intelligent life is sending them.

Within a few years, the SETI at Home Project recruited 3.8 million people.

I hijacked my parents' little Gateway 2000, and I absolutely cooked it, trying to contribute to what seemed like the thing, right?

It seemed like the one opportunity living in the middle of nowhere and sort of like rural

eastern Washington, like, oh, I can be part of this journey that humankind is on. It was

amazing. That's my friend James Davenport. He's an astronomer at the University of Washington,

and his focus is on stars. And I talked to him recently because, importantly, for this episode, he's a collaborator with the SETI Institute, a nonprofit research organization that combs through astronomical data in search of signs of life outside of Earth.

It's a search that goes way back, way before James and I took control of our family's computers,

in 1924, when many researchers were excited about Mars, and Mars's orbit was close to Earth,

making it a prime time to listen to signals from the planet. And so, an unconventional astronomer named David Todd convinced multiple radio stations in the U.S. and one in South

...